"The manner is a forthright one, but Oppitz is no boor. The playing is never overtly espressivo, but within the parameters of Oppitz’s style there is ample recognition of Beethoven’s expressive intent in dolce and pianissimo passages...The recording of the Fourth Concerto is admirably explicit, the piano sound clear and forward but not inappropriately so, the orchestra nicely observed...I would not have thought this disc competitive with the best of its rivals – but it is certainly not without interest where Oppitz himself is concerned."

- Richard Osborne, Gramophone [6/1997]

Landowska's big Pleyel harpsichord was famous, indeed notorious, for its timbral bells and whistles, along with pedals that allowed her to shift registrations on a dime. In other words, it was inauthentic by the authenticity standards of today's historically informed scholar/harpsichordists. So was her subjective, forceful interpretive style. But you can't ignore Landowska's Bach any more than you can look the other way when Horowitz plays Liszt or Toscanini conducts Verdi. The orchestral impact and youthful swagger of the C minor partita's outer movements belie the artist's advanced age, while her finely honed legato technique and wide arsenal of articulations in the Three-Part Inventions substantiate Virgil Thomson's claim that Landowska had "a brain in every finger".

Landowska looked upon her Well-Tempered Clavier recording as her "last will and testament", and a studied air hovers around some of her slow tempo choices. Severe, ricercare-like pieces can be protracted to the point of self-importance, like...the Book II F minor prelude. She also makes curious textual decisions... You also might take issue with her strange rhythmic rewrite of the Book II A minor fugue. Then again, I can't resist...her profound instinct for much of the music's dance-like implications.

--Jed Distler, ClassicsToday.com

*** This title is a reissue of a Japanese release with liner notes in Japanese. ***

One of my favourite Bach keyboard works, BWV 988, the Goldberg Variations, seems to have been taken over by versions for piano in my collection. A candlelit performance by Trevor Pinnock at Dyrham Park House lives on in the memory however, and Landowska’s performance is stately to say the least. Her opening tempi are withheld, building the foundations of an interpretation which arches over the entire set of variations, which is the way it should be. The full weight of the Pleyel instrument is also brought forth in measured doses, and the simpler textures of the two-part variations are unencumbered by extraneous and unnecessary effects. Landmarks along the way stand like granite monuments in the musical landscape, and Variation 21; Canone alla settima, and the fantasia-like Variation 25 are both forward looking and somehow nostalgic. The story is a long and serious one, but the listener is encouraged at each turn by lighter moments, and with Variation 26 we are homeward bound and no mistake. The arrival of the Quodlibet, with its little song quotations is our salvation, and the final Aria our ‘Memento Mori’. It is Bach’s epic novel in musical form, and you will be hard put to find a better storyteller than Landowska.

-- Dominy Clements, MusicWeb International [reviewing RCA 67891]

BACH STOKOWSKI - DOLBY SURROU

"Harvested by Bartók, Kodály and a few others from 1904–5 on, [the authentic folk music of the Hungarian peasant], with its characteristic melodic contours, provided the leaven for a generation of Hungarian composers to create an entirely new musical ethos. There were other influences upon Bartók, among them those of Debussy, Stravinsky and Schoenberg; he also investigated and allowed his music to be colored by folk music other than Hungarian, especially Romanian, Slovakian and Arabic. But it was from Hungarian music itself that he drew the strongest sustenance, Hungarian peasant music that had for generations rubbed shoulders with, influencing and being influenced by, the music of neighboring peoples. “Race purity” in music, he believed resulted in musical poverty: the richest hoard of folk music is fructified by the music it comes into contact with...

Notable in the quartets from No. 2 on is an unprecedented interest in extending stringed-instrument techniques. Before Bartók composers had been content to write mainly within the traditional virtuoso limits, and even Paul Hindemith, a string player himself, had little interest in going beyond the normal or conventional bowing and fingering procedures. These did not satisfy Bartók, who demanded unusual multiple stops, unorthodox fingerings, several different types of pizzicato and glissando and a whole arsenal of special effects that have revolutionized the string player’s approach to his instrument – all despite Bartók’s never having played any but keyboard instruments.

But the importance of his achievement lies not in the ingenuity of the writing or the novelty of the style but in the strength and persuasion of the works that resulted. In all these quartets musical logic prevails; the materials are distinctive and memorable, their manipulation magisterial, and the combination produces an unparalleled series of masterpieces, each with its individual delights – and its individual problems for players and listeners alike."

— excerpt from the original liner notes from ARL3–2412 by Halsey Stevens

BAROQUE BRASS DONALD FRASER,

In arranging the G minor Piano Quartet Schoenberg intended ‘to remain strictly in the style of Brahms and not to go farther than he himself would have gone if he lived today’. In our authentically-minded age, it is hard to believe that he failed to register the contradiction; but he certainly achieved his goal, which was ‘Brahms’s Fifth’. Sometimes the diversity of colour reaches well into the 20th century, but it is a transcription by a master of the Romantic orchestra. Indeed, the pudding may seem over-egged (whooping horns, Wagnerian tuba, muted brass, the brilliant gypsy finale raising shades of Carmen): don’t listen too soon after a good, original performance. The Bach arrangements are more adventurous, and less likely to offend precisely because there is no aesthetic contact between Schoenberg’s orchestra and Bach’s organ. The colour is brighter, but the concept no more intrinsically bold, the brass writing no more resonantly anachronistic, than in Elgar’s orchestrations. The St Anne Prelude, BWV 552, is rhetorically portentous, its contrasts exaggerated by articulation of attack and colour. The orchestral virtuosity is admirable in the transparent fugue and thoroughly engaging chorale preludes.

-- Julian Rushton, BBC Music Magazine

*** This title is a reissue of a Japanese release with liner notes in Japanese. ***

*** This title is a reissue of a Japanese release with liner notes in Japanese. ***

BACH: CONCERTOS VLADIMIR SPIV

If Kissin were a singer, he would definitely be on the opera stage. He produces a sound which is deep, weighty and brilliant, and projects the opening of Kreisleriana as if he were Jove himself venting his rage.

Yevgeny Kissin may look like a marionette, but if he were a singer, he would definitely be on the opera stage. He does not bash, but he produces a sound which is deep, weighty and brilliant. He projects the opening piece of Kreisleriana as if he were Jove himself venting his rage – not quite the passionate eccentricity Schumann had in mind, perhaps, though the contrasting quiet section is delicious. Nor does the second piece begin quite ‘inwardly’ as marked, though it is very considered, and while Kissin makes the first Intermezzo dazzling, he misses Schumann’s simple joy. From the second Intermezzo alone you know it is Kissin playing because of his characteristic – and deliberate – dragging of the left hand behind the right. His constant virtue is commitment to every single note he plays, which makes the final section of this extended piece, if much larger than life, incredibly compelling.

No pianist today (or yesterday) is more lavishly gifted than Kissin purely as a technician. For natural brilliance, perhaps, Martha Argerich compares, and it is her recording of Kreisleriana with which this new release invites comparison. Though Kissin’s recording is rich and spacious, it doesn’t make use of the microphone to produce all those half-lights and impalpable shadows that Argerich achieved. And Kissin hasn’t Argerich’s range of response to the picturesque – none of her secretive mood in the third piece, her impish glee in the fifth, nor above all, her sense of intimacy.

And yet, on its own, very ‘public’ terms, this issue is overwhelming, with a performance of the Bach-Busoni Chaconne which, for once, bears no sign of straining the medium.

Performance: 5 (out of 5), Sound: 5 (out of 5)

-- Adrian Jack, BBC Music Magazine

Personnel includes: Jerry Hadley (vocals); Jay Berliner (guitar, mandolin); John Moses (clarinet); Dominic Cortese (accordion); John Beal (bass); Barry Mitterhoff (mandolin).

Recording information: Clinton Recording Studios, Studio A, New York, NY (05/24/1995-09/27/1995); Soundtrack Recording Studios, Studio A, New York, NY (05/24/1995-09/27/1995).

ANNIE'S SONG & OTHER GALWAY FA

Anne Akiko Meyers is a thoughtful rather than a flamboyant virtuoso, and the four items here suit her exceptionally well. There is no feeling that the shorter pieces are in any way mere fillers, so rapt is her playing.

The sweet, gentle opening of the Mendelssohn Concerto, as presented by Anne Akiko Meyers, immediately sets the pattern not only for that central work, but for the whole, unusual collection on this disc. As her previous discs for RCA have demonstrated, this violinist, born in California in 1970, is a thoughtful rather than a flamboyant virtuoso, and the four items here suit her exceptionally well. There is no feeling that the shorter pieces are in any way mere fillers, so rapt is her playing, with the opening of the Vaughan Williams bringing a pianissimo of breathtaking intensity, as instantly established by the Philharmonia strings under Andrew Litton.

Particularly after reviewing Itzhak Perlman's live version of the Mendelssohn, recorded in Chicago, I have inevitably been struck that this is a small-scale reading, but in context that hardly matters. From the limited range of dynamic here as well as the total absence of forcing—even when in the finale she plays with quicksilver velocity at a tempo no slower than Perlman's—one's impression tends to be confirmed that Meyers's tone is not large, but she compensates in sweetness and poetry. My only reservation is that in her legato playing the microphone tends to pick up and exaggerate the occasional unwanted portamento. Her flowing speed for the Andante completely avoids sentimentality, however sweetly lyrical the result.

In a way I am sorry that the Vaughan Williams is not placed first on the disc, for there the raptness of Meyers's playing is even more striking, and Andrew Litton—who from the start of his career has shown what great sympathy he has for British music—makes the most understanding accompanist. The atmospheric intensity of the performance is enhanced by the vividly full-bodied recording, built on a very solid bass, and the refinement of sound, with the violin set naturally rather than spotlit, is equally impressive in the Dvorak, which emerges as far more than just a salon piece with a Slavonic flavour. The Massenet too, which can seem all too sweet, is played with a natural gravity, with Meyers avoiding the temptation to exaggerate her warm G-string tone. Though there are many other versions of the Mendelssohn with obviously higher priorities, this one, offering an unusual sequence of other items, all played with compelling dedication and poetry, and recorded in vivid sound, clearly has its place.'

Edward Greenfield, Gramophone (2/1994)

Personnel includes: Frank Sinatra, Connie Haines, The Pied Pipers (vocals);
Tommy Dorsey & His Orchestra.
Recorded between 1940 & 1942.
In 1939, Frank Sinatra scored his very first success, "All Or Nothing At All," with trumpeter Harry James' Orchestra. The following year the young singer began an extraordinary two year apprenticeship with the much classier Tommy Dorsey Orchestra, a regimen which taught him everything he needed to know about musical taste and judgement if not popular adulation. Make no mistake, however; from the beginning, through sheer dint of will, Sinatra managed to make his time with the master trombonist and bandleader a collaboration of musical equals.
Milestone recordings like "Stardust," "I'll Be Seeing You," "I'll Never Smile Again," "Everything Happens To Me" et al are both big band classics and the beginning of a new age of romantic popular singing. No male singer had ever gone as far as Sinatra did in exploring the tender feelings expressed in these songs, in identifying so completely with a given song's meaning. It was a revolution in popular sensibility that we are still living through several decades later.